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When Videogames Know They're Videogames
An anonymous reader writes "In 'I Never Metagame I Didn't Like', AllRPG.com goes into a discussion of metagaming - what it is and some games which feature it. The piece explains: 'Metagames show awareness of their nature as games. These games ignore all pretense of being a representation of a reality--rather, they know that they're polygons on a screen', and goes on to reference titles such as Earthbound and Metal Gear Solid as examples." Are there other examples of titles which address the player in this awfully postmodern way?
Does anyone else remember when it was called "Breaking/Breaching the 4th wall?"
"Metagaming" sounds like playing a game of characters playing a game (Remember the special opening movie on Summoner?)
Little moments of that sort of third-wall breaking can be good to relieve the monotony, however. I particularly like the little voice that harangues you whenever you pause in Viewtiful Joe ("OK, is it number one, or number two?")
--- Bwah?
"and some games which feature it"
Metagames exist in every game. This term has been coined long before this author thought it up, but really he's just talking about particular games' self awareness (to which the term Metagame does not apply).
A Metagame is the game that goes on in the players mind, when *they* step past the suspension of disbelief to tackle the actual game mechanics, and not the fantasy scenarios involved.
A good example of this would be a First Person Shooter. The "game" is where you, as John Doe Mercenary must blow your way past the Evil Terrorist Organization, using all available weaponry to eliminate your foes and survive.
The "Metagame" in this example is really how quickly and acurrately you can move the mouse and click while using the arrow keys to avoid incoming hits. That is the *true* challenge of the game; hence: "metagame".
I think this author should read up a bit on common game design theories and philosophy before tackling another subject like this. All he's really doing is trying to coin a term that has been in common use in the game design field for several years.
At least his footnotes know they are footnotes.
Money for nothing, pix for free
... because I have a copied version of the game, you insensitive clod!
In The Curse of Monkey Island Guybrush Threepwood is buried alive and the credits start scrolling, when suddenly Guybrush starts yelling about how you can't die in these LucasArts games.
Does that count?
His description is not a metagame. A metagame is when the player engages the gameplay mechanics directly, taking a step back from the suspension of disbelief to play on a different level outside the boundaries of the games world, NOT when a game breaks the "fourth wall" and becomes self-aware.
In one of the new the .Hack games, based on a relatively popular anime, you play a player who is playing an MMORPG that he's stuck in. The game is therefore a single player simulation of an MMORPG, complete with the game AI playing as players, and also as NPCs. The gameplay is also based on currenty-day MMORPG gameplay - the focus being entirely on levelling and getting new stuff.
Sounds JUST ABSOLUTELY THRILLING to me.
Remember Monkey Island? Hermann Toothrot frequently turns to the screen and comments on things, and when asked who he's talking to he replies, "the people watching, of course." Then there's the famous "rubber tree" scene poking fun at Sierra adventures. And I'm pretty sure the "that's the second largest monkey head I've ever seen" bit is a reference to the player, too.
The fake "game over" is a pretty common gag in adventure games, actually... I can think of several other (more obscure) titles that feature it.
Jedi Academy comes close with a line that, to anyone who played Jedi Knight 2, pretty obviously makes fun of JK2's nonsensical puzzles.
For great justice.
I had a great laugh in Max Payne when in one of the dream sequences, a phone rings and (I believe it's Mona) says: "It's a video game, Max.". He then proceeds to rattle off all the features of Max Payne, complete with various screenshots, mentions being under complete control by some nerd, and finishes off with something along the lines of "It was the most horrifying thought I've ever had".
I really got a big kick out of that.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
I'm pretty sure you mean 4th wall. The other three being curtains with the left being right and the right being left.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
"Meta-game" terminology aside, the most horrific example of breaking the 3rd wall happened in the original X-Men game for the Genesis. Apparently, the team thought it would be cute to force the player to stop a self-destructing computer from counting down by resetting it / resetting the Genesis. Of course, nobody could figure out that what the designers wanted the players to do was to walk over to their machines and push the reset button, so many people just though the game wasn't finished.
I personally think it was done as a collaboration with Sega to sell more controllers. There's only so many times you can throw one of those into a television before one or the other breaks.
The ______ Agenda
... did it a few times. A few times too many I thought.
I went through that. Boy did I go through that.
The only way I figured out what you had to do was because I went through the game to that poitn so many times that I just got fed up and hit "reset" to get to play it again faster. I hit reset and learned that, no, that button isn't hard-wired, it's actually software controlled! Boy was I angry, and at the same time, horribly amused.. To think, I'd spent hours looking around on the SCREEN for a reset button!
To date I haven't found an emulator that correctly emulates the Reset button to play this game correctly....
It's very similar to when a character in a movie will look at the camera and toss off a one-liner to the audience.
Well I would have thought that means an 'Aside' but surely you'd get in trouble if you tossed-off to the audience.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was scary, when you got into the the big ship...cant remember what its called, you get the millitary fella going "put down the controller, you cant face this game" and generally doing the whole psyche out. Of course i played this part at 3am which didnt help.
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
I'm playing through the first of these games at the moment and I actually seriously doubt you've played it. First of all, the character you play in the .hack game series is not stuck in the game "The World". I think you're getting mixed up with the anime here.
Also, the focus isn't really on levelling and getting new stuff, although, as with most other RPGs, there is an element of this to it. Broadly speaking, the game is like any other Japanese single-player RPG, with plot sequences linked together by dungeons. Combat is relatively fast paced and arcade-like... if you've played Zelda or Kingdom Hearts, you'll have a rough idea of what to expect. The "MMORPG like" elements essentially boil down to the fact that NPCs frequently speak out-of-character and use smileys and the like and the general look of many of the playing-fields, which tend to have the spartan look usually associated with MMORPGs.
Except these games are presented in a 2D medium :)
OK, so they're in 3D... will you settle for the 3-and-halfth wall?
deus does not exist but if he does
Are there other examples of titles which address the player in this awfully postmodern way?
"Postmodernism" was coined in the 1970s. This phenomenon is significantly older, dating at least back to Shakespeare!
"Lord of the Rings" is structured in such a way that the characters are cognizant of their status as characters.
And for a modern example in games, how about the units in Blizzard RTS games that dislike being clicked on repeatedly...
Hitch-hiker's Guide was sort of self-aware, in parts. Mainly in the hints section, where it says things like 'the game's probably annoyed with you because it lost that argument'. I'm not really sure if this would qualify, though.
Do you have any source on your definition on metagame?
I really wish the artistic community could invent a better name than post-modern for the current period. The real problem is the usage of the word modern to mean a period which ended more than a hundred years ago. No one else uses the word modern this way and to change it to conform with the artistic world would be more complicated than the reverse. Is Linux a powerful, modern, operating system? Oh excuse me. It's a powerful post-modern operating system. And it's not "this modern world". It'd be "This Post-Modern world". The phrase modern computer would become oxymoronic.
I suppose the people who use Gnu/Linux should start calling Linux a postmodern OS first.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Also, when Fry walks into the room that is the final battle of the game (which is often called the "boss level"), he says something to the effect of: "Uh oh, this looks like a boss level."
There are other examples in that game.
At the end of the introductory clip, as Homer has decorated his car as a taxi and asks the family what they think, Bart says: "Just get to the game already!"
If you run out of time while driving a "Road Rage" level, at the end each character has a unique funny comment. Several of them say things that seem to refer to the game, like "I thought I had more time left" and so on.
When you finish the game, the camera zooms out of the "You Won The Game" screen to reveal that the game was being played by the aliens Kang and Kodos. One says, "This game grows tiresome!" The other responds, "Insert the alternate game disk." They then start playing an alien version of Pong and fly off.
Yeah that angered me too. I must have played to Mojo's world a few dozen times. I finally got so upset being locked in that final room and not finding the 'switch' to reset the computer I got up and slammed the reset button. I hit it so hard that when the binary display on the screen started rolling by, I thought i might have done permanent damage to the system. To my surprise I finally figured out the solution. That was probably one of the best experiences in video gaming I've ever had (despite the anger) and will probably never happen again. It's too simple now to go to GameFAQs when I don't know what to do in a game.
That sounds much cooler than defining it as "games that break the fourth wall," especially given some of the lame examples we've seen here.
Conker's Bad Fur Day has the most metagame ending there is. "Can you believe that? The game froze!"
I have always heard a different definition for Metagaming.
When I play pen and paper rpgs (Dungeons and Dragons, anything from whitewolf, etc), we refer to metagaming as acting in game on information that you shouldnt know in game.
For example, the party is divided into two groups, one goes to investigate something, the other goes to find out more from the police. They roleplay the encounter with the police and the other group of course hears this in real life. Say that the police tells that group that the enemy is very well armed. Then it would be metagaming for the other group to suddenly be a lot more cautious than they would be had they not overheard (IRL) the conversation the other group had.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
I guess in that case it was more of "breaking the controller" rather than "breaking the third wall".
A stage has three walls for real. The fourth one is the invisible one, which you're not supposed to break.
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
The earliest memory I have of somethin metagamish, is probably Playing the mini-games in System Shock. They were really a game in a game, since you had to have a physical game pad to upload the games to. And in the games themselves, which showed up in one of the left or right screens, you battled against SHODAN and she had all the insanely high scores... When I first found them, I was wondering whether it was pre-cogniscient or cogniscient SHODAN I was playing against. A nice diversion from the game.
A more recent example is something that was mentioned in another post: Character response to player (in-)activity. I've noticed in a couple of games. Prince of Persia has a really good one, which doesn't break the atmosphere or the premise of the story.. "shall I go on?"
There's commander keen, of course (which I know is older than system shock....) who read a book and fell asleep and did stuff, if you left him in the middle of a level. Sonic, I think did it too. It's most common in scrollers, since the premise is frequently simple enough that you can get away with breaking the game world conventions like that.
More and more game NPC's comment on their own world, often reflecting on the absurdity or irrationality of game constructs. I recall a morrowind NPC worrying about the fact noone goes to sleep at night. That's interesting considering there was a sleep cycle in Daggerfall.
More and more games have this habit, as the worlds they create become more complex, yet with obvious limitations. It's a measure of the sophistication of gamers and developers, that limitations are not only accepted, but deliberatly pointed out.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
If you start getting into dimensionality, you have to acknoledge that there are walls below and above the subject as well, so the fourth wall becomes the sixth wall. It doesn't count because the upper and lower walls are the floor and ceiling, so...
Ues the term, don't worry about it.
Incidentally, is anyone else sick of webcomics that frequently dip into idiotic "our ratings are slipping" fourth-wall breakage? Bleh. They even use the term fourth wall, and the comics from each are interchangeable, except for Checkerboard Nightmare, which has the guts to do practically nothing but fourth wall breakage.
Ok guys, we've argued about the semantics of "meta-gaming" long enough. So the word was used incorrectly. big deal. We all know what was meant. Could we, maybe, start talking about the article, rather than the misuse of a word? Or am I being too picky?
I'm most familiar with the term "metagame" in relation to Magic: the Gathering. The metagame with MtG is essentially a step above actually playing the card game. It's knowing how the players, the current card sets and deck trends are working together. For example, at a given moment, decks featuring goblins may be very popular, so you need to fashion your deck to take that into account. You play the metagame before (and while) you actually play the game.
Both Paper Mario on the N64 and Mario and Luigi for the GBA have some great moments where a character interacts with the player... for instance there is a scene in one where a character flys into the camera and cracks the lense. Pretty funny. I know there are others, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment.
Actually, many games have NPCs that tell the player to use controller buttons to do things, where the buttons are not considered in any sort of game context (like on a control panel). Nintendo's games are full of this, and are probably where it started, where some of the little elf people in Kokiri Forest keep telling you how to perform moves, and the signs outside of Peach's castle refer to pushing control sticks around.
Earthbound's been mentioned before, but really, it probably the most meta (in the writer's sense) of all, even more than Metal Geal Solid. There's a character named Ruffini the Dog who becomes possessed by the spirit of the game designer. One character lends you money at some point, and if you forget to pay it back, he calls you up after the credits. And after you beat the last boss, during the infamous everyone-has-something-new-to-say bit before the "real" ending, Ruffini the Dog gets possessed again, and *gives you the address of Nintendo in Japan*, to which you can send your opinion of the game!
And let's not forget about Animal Crossing. How could we leave out Mr. Resetti?
I googled to try to find the exact text of this, but was unsuccessful. Thankfully, the joke was funny enough that I remember it pretty well.
In Squaresoft's 1995 game The Secret of Evermore (which was produced entirely by Americans, coincidently), there was a section of the game that took place in a huge, open-air marketplace set in pseudo-Roman times.
Within this marketplace, there was a character tossing out the ambient "The End Is Near!" warnings and the like. Eventually, though, if you get into a conversation with him, the exchange goes something like this (emphasis mine at the end)....
The End Is Near Guy: The End Is Near!
You: Uh huh.
TEIN Guy: We have no control over our destiny!
You: Whatever.
TEIN Guy: In fact, we are being controlled by outside forces!
You: Suuuure.
TEIN Guy: It's true! We but answer to the directions of our huge, button-pushing overlords!
You: Riiiiight.
TEIN Guy: If I am lying, may the gods strike me down where I stand!
At this point, a dialog box pops up, with the options "Goat, Chicken, Basket" of which you get to select one.
After selecting, two lightning bolts flash down from the sky onto TEIN Guy, and whatever you selected is left standing in his place.
- Neil
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Examples of metagaming abound.
...Eternal Darkness. Anybody who has played this knows how much the game drains the game player's sanity as well as the in-game characters'. I freaked out when the game made me think that I accidently erased my roommate's memory card. And there are many other examples of the game playing with the player in real life.
In Warcraft 3, one of the Night Elf units says "For the end of the world spell, press CTRL-ALT-DELETE". Does that count?
meh
In Duke Nukem 3D, on the first level there is a video arcade room. One of the machines is a Duke Nukem video game. If you activate it, Duke says "I don't have time to play with myself".
In Eternal Darkness, Sanity's Requiem, your character has a sanity meter. When your sanity gets low, certain in-game effects happen, such as hearing strange voices, having the camera angle tilt crazily, walking on the ceiling, or even hallucinating battles that don't really happen.
However, certain effects break out of the game. In one, for example, the screen goes black, it looks like the game system reboots, and displays a "controller error" message screen. The first few times things like that happened, I thought my game had malfunctioned, but later I correlated these to losses of in-game sanity. I think this was very effective in making sanity loss seem real, by making the player (as well as the character) think he's losing his mind.
A small, subtle, but clever example of this is in Whiplash, where you play as a weasel chained to a (conveniently invulnerable) rabbit, and the gameplay centers around hitting things with the rabbit, when you're not setting him on fire, freezing him, dipping him in toxic waste, shoving him down toilets, inflating him with helium, or just whirling him around your head to make a helicopter.
The rabbit, not surprisingly, keeps up a constant stream of complaints about the indignities you're subjecting him to. One of the things he yells is, "I'm a rabbit! Not a core mechanic! OKAY?"
Thought that was a nice touch, myself.
1) Star Tropics on the NES required you to dip a letter included with the game in water to reveal a watermark necessary to complete the game.
2) There's one moment in Day of the Tentacle when a character makes a comment about feeling like they're being controlled by some force, and then looking at the player...I can't put my finger on any specifics, though.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
In this game the guy that lost his soul could never die, I thought that it explained nicely why you get infinite lives... kinda made the end to simple though...
Jeoin
Back in warcraft and warcraft 2 when you click on the units repeatedly they will say things like "quit poking me!" (the cursor was a hand with 1 finger extended..) In black & White the good and evil concious characters make a few comments worthy of this subject.
In one of the phantasy star 2 prelude games, there's a house where a slightly dazed kid is playing it as well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Bangai-O's characters not only know they are in a videogame - they even praise the fact that it is an old-skool 2D game!
By the way, that's one of the best games ever. For Nintendo64 (Japan-only, very rare) and Dreamcast.
Circumcision is child abuse.
...since half of you didn't read it (yes, I'm looking at you) I'll mention it here. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, you start the game in the "real" world. And I mean real - the main character's favorite game is Final Fantasy (he lives in a yellow house, too, which really freaked me out because I do, too - what are the odds? ;-)). Well, anyhoo, he finds a magic book with his friends and they're all transported into a very Final Fantasy-like world. (The character even mentions that the world is just like the one in FF, and that the characters he meets, he's only seen before in video games and didn't think they were real). A classic example, and splendidly executed (OK! I get it! I'm an FF fanboy!).
I was kinda hoping that in Enter the Matrix they'd kinda poke some jokes about the essence of video games compared to the Matrix and all that, but alas, that would be far too non-crappy for EtM. :-|
I like "metagaming." It's fun - it does kinda draw you out of the game and make you realize that it's not real, but that's where the humor comes from - that's the point. The characters are realizing their own (non?-)existance.
Snake is told to 'look at the optical disk's case' when you have to find Meryl's frequency. And you, the player, are told this right after Snake recieves a disk and case that look remarkably CD-case like. I would say this is in a similiar spirit to the example given for StarTropics.
However, this illusion goes away in "The Twin Snakes" where, while the line is the same, the case no longer appears remotely CD-like.
Yeah, actually there's only one game that I'm aware of that really IS a meta-game, and not just for short sequences, and that'd be Omikron: The Nomad Soul. I'm surprised no one mentioned it yet.
In the beginning of the game a guy that's aware that you're sitting in front of your computer says you have to concentrate to enter his body by entering his dimension. Later on they explain to you that the game being sold in our world really is a trap to get players attracted in that other dimension so that demons from that world can get our soul, and that we must take the game seriously as if we got caught by demons in the game, our soul would be trapped there and our real body would just be an empty shell in front of our computer forever. The only way to save our soul is to finish the game by killing the demon.
Besides, it's a great game, I recently picked it up real cheap and I love it.
bool Marketoid::IsGood(){return IsDead();}
...had numerous references to the player, the game itself, the developers (lionhead studios), and even south park. Ingame the player has a good and an evil conscience, and the two constantly bicker.
Some of the more amusing conversations between the two occur when you don't touch the keyboard for a while. Here are some samples:
Good conscience: "Jeez, our Boss is inactive. Let's rock from side to side."
Evil conscience: "Maybe we can tip over the monitor!"
Good: "No, you red fool. We're part of the conscience. We're inside our god's head!"
Evil: "Okay. Let's rock and tip over the Boss's mind!"
Good: "Hmm. You are the weirdest demon I've ever shared a skull with."
---
Good: "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with B"
Evil: "Brain."
Good: "Yes."
Evil: "OK. I spy with my evil eye, something beginning with S"
Good: "Skull."
Evil: "Yeah."
Good: "I spy with my little..."
Evil: "Shuddup! Sorry. I just can't take it any more. Skull, brain, brain skull.") Good: "You're right. We should get out more."
In Prince of Persia 2(the original side-view platforming series), you reach a point in the game where you must die to continue. ...yeah.
You see, you're in this temple, and you want to steal the magic flame hidden inside it. But, as one message reads, "he who would steal the flame must die."
The thing is, you might easily miss this and get stuck, because the player can "end" the Prince's death and restart the level at any time. Instead you have to wait for quite a while after he dies, perhaps 15 seconds, to get the flame. It's metagaming in the most direct sense - you, the player, have to take action - or inaction rather - at a point when you normally are no longer controlling the gameplay, the place where we all habitually hit the button and restart/reload. And neither are you directly addressed to do something different after your death - the entire puzzle hinges upon correctly interpreting the message.
Very tricky puzzle, that one. But then, PoP2 as a whole was a tricky game, with many puzzles of that nature. Unfortunately the whole thing got bogged down by introducing new types of traps and fights that were frustrating and less satisfying than the original's.
*sticks fingers in ears* LALALALLALA! I don't heeear you! Dude! I'm almost done with the game! I wanna do this myself! Don't give it away! Warn me when you're about to give a spoiler! >:P
Though if you're talking about what I think you're talking about (I just read the first couple words of the parent, but DON'T TELL ME) I already figured out I was gonna have to do something like that when she read me the poetry.
Stupid bats... I want my dagger back, damnit.
One game not mentioned in that heavily implements some of the concepts in the article is Namco/Monolith's forthcoming RPG, Baten Kaitos. (Released in December 2003 in Japan; NA/European release dates TBA.)
In Kaitos, the player assumes the role of a guiding "spirit" that travels with the main character throughout the story. It's a pretty cool concept, actually: the main character "introduces" each new party member to you as you play, and asks you for input before making a decision. It doesn't really affect gameplay much, but it draws a concrete line between the player and the main character, something which has seldom been done in the genre.
"Metagames show awareness of their nature as games [snip] they know that they're polygons on a screen"
"Are there other examples of titles which address the player in this awfully postmodern way?"
Hmm... well apart from the fact that not every game consists of polygons (and not every game uses a screen) - what you're actually asking is "are there any games that don't create a reality or role for the user other than that of being the player?" To which the answer of course is yes... let me start you off... Tetris. Hmm, don't recall any backstory or explanation why those blocks keep on falling... it's just... wait for it... a game. Blimey. It's hardly postmodernism.
Heh, whoops I thought the parent was about PoP: Sands of Time, not PoP2. When I finished the game (a few minutes ago) I came back and read the post. Obviously what I thought was a spoiler was not (at least, not for PoP:SoT). Go ahead, laugh. I'm sure you were already (or were really confused). :P
;)
Here's a real SPOILER WARNING (sorta):
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I thought when Farrah read the poetry to the prince in the library about dying in love in order to live was a hint that later in the game I'd have to die in order to win the game. And she follows up the poetry with a comment along the lines of "That's not how this game works," so I thought that it tied in nicely with the article about metagaming/breaking the fourth wall. So I thought I was all smart and had it all figured out when I read the first couple lines of the parent... that is until I finished the game and saw no opportunity to kill myself (other than jumping off of buildings or diving in front of a sand creature's sword, and that obviously didn't do anything helpful for me). It may, however, have been a reference to that part where you have to die in PoP2 that I vaugely remember (I played the game so long ago that I'm not even sure I finished it).
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END SPOILER
Game kicked ass anyway. I may have to play it again... like, tomorrow.
The main goal of Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon was to rescue the two guys from Andromeda, the designers of the Space Quest series. Many games have throw-away "metagame" gags, but this one was the basis for the entire plot.
I always liked the annoyed responses when you repeatedly click on units in Blizzard's RTS games. My favourite is from the Brood War expansion for StarCraft, and definitely qualifies as a metagame joke as defined by the article. In the single player campaigns there is a Protoss character that if you repeatedly click on him eventually says "This is not just WarCraft in space!", "It's much more sophisticated!", and finally "I KNOW it's not 3D!"
"Metagames show awareness of their nature as games [snip] they know that they're polygons on a screen"
"Are there other examples of titles which address the player in this awfully postmodern way?"
Darkened Skye (Review at The Adrenaline Vault) Not the best game I've ever played, but I continue to play it for this very reason. It doesn't take itself seriously. The main character (Skye) and her helper deamon (Draak) know very well that they are in a game. That and the fact that it's an interactive Skittles commercial.
At one point you have to jump into the mouth of a sea monster, and she (Skye) says something to the effect of "Well, quick saves are designed for times like this".
At another point you grab a hair pin from a wig while the owner of said wig looks on, and she states "Only in an adventure game would I be able to grab this hairpin in plain sight of the owner without the owner making a fuss... Oh, wait. This is an adventure game."
The game's wit is about its only saving grace...